Green builders show they can walk the walk

Friday

Craig and Nedra Mitchell didn’t move into the New Longview development in Lee’s Summit, Mo., to prove any ecological point – not at first, anyway.

Craig and Nedra Mitchell didn’t move into the New Longview development in Lee’s Summit, Mo., to prove any ecological point – not at first, anyway.

They moved into their new three-bedroom home on Grandstand Circle to “blend the family,” a term Craig Mitchell offered quickly when asked.

“Really it was just a way to bring the family together,” he said. “The green issue came later, and it became a selling point for us.”

A current Overland Park, Mo., resident, Craig Mitchell’s daughter attends school in Lee’s Summit. Nedra Mitchell has seen her children from a previous marriage go off to college.

Now was the time to move.

Into a green home.

Actually, the home is antique white and conventional looking – far more traditional than many progressive style homes surrounding Kansas City. Their new home, priced at $380,000 (a 3 percent markup because of its green components) and ready for occupancy this fall, is one of two homes currently under construction in New Longview that follow and promote new National Association of Home Builders guidelines.

At a mid-July news conference, the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City launched its new program called Build Green Kansas City. In the planning stages, the program is meant to provide area home builders with information on using national green guidelines designed exclusively for residential construction.

“Build Green Kansas City is the first local program in the area promoting nationally recognized guidelines for green building,” Tim Underwood, the Home Builder’s Association executive vice president and CEO, said. “We’re excited.”

Excited indeed: green, after all, is red hot these days. By 2012, the HBA anticipates that 20 percent of the United States housing market share will be green. Such homes, most common in housing developments where exclusive developers have creative control over all aspects of the neighborhood, fall into three standards – gold, silver, and bronze.

The Mitchells' home is classified as gold, or a home that satisfies seven of the measuring points of building green.

Using common sense building tactics and technological innovation, building green is not as new to the Kansas City area as you would think. As early as the 1980s, the HBA of Kansas City developed the Saving America’s Valuable Energy program, one of the first in the nation that promoted energy saving techniques to be included in new homes; then in 2001, the association introduced its own green-building principles, using those same principles to help with the creation of the National Association of Homebuilder’s guidelines.

At first glance, the Mitchell home appears common. G. David Gale, president of Gale Communities, the developer that designed the New Longview development and the Mitchell home, said the standards by which the home was built took into account not only green principles inside the home but outside it as well.

“Back 19 years ago, not one developer accepted our vision of a 40-year shingle, and we had to build our first two homes the way we wanted to. Now (the shingles) are veiwed as practical and necessary,” Gale said. “Here in Longview, we’ve taken the residential green home to the next level of marketing acceptance.”

As a gold home, the Mitchell home succeeds in accomplishing green standards in a way that few homes do. From lot design, preparation and development to educating the homeowner in how he/she operates their home, the Mitchell home is a kind of complex machine.

When the home was first designed, developers took into account the natural landscape surrounding the property. They ensured that the home’s placement would not disturb the natural environment (a concept they applied to the development as a whole). Gale designed the home in such a way as to save and manage on-site trees, on-site water retention and infiltration features.

For materials, developers used engineered wood products (some recycled) that use materials in which 50 percent of the log is converted into structural lumber, which is significantly more than conventional dimensional lumber. The home also has expanding waterproofing materials, which does as it claims: expands as the home settles over a period of years.

At the site itself (and other sites in the neighborhood), left-over materials are conspicuously absent. An average single-family home generates as much as six tons of construction waste. By using planning software during the initial stages of design, developers are able to avoid that. Few materials – wood and metal, mostly – are left over.

Kim Humbert, whose husband co-ownes Advantage Framing in Olathe, said their company has been using technology to better plan and design homes for years.

“I’d say it is a common sense approach,” Humbert agreed. “We’ve been pushing the concept for a long time in the area.”

She said her husband sees current efforts to reduce waste at the site as something he’s been aspiring for – and makes the focus of his company – for years.

By using green principles for materials – using recycling centers for materials, creating effective construction designs – developers are able to reduce waste by two-thirds, according to NAHB figures.

Energy efficient technology, whether its equipment furnished by Energy Star or simply by the way the developer installs modern amenities in the house in such a way to make them work together, is another factor that makes a home gold.

An average home built between 1990 and 2001 consumed about 12,800 killowatts per year, according to NAHB, but efforts to improve that continue. Developers created the Mitchell home with superior insulation materials, with wooden foundations significantly thicker than traditional homes; they also employ sealing techniques and extensive and thorough ventilation designs that exceed past techniques.

With more efficient electrical appliances and heating and cooling systems, developers hope to reduce the average amount of carbon released into the atmosphere annually. Currently, 2,700 lbs is released per person each year, but Energy Star and other like-minded companies hope to reduce energy and water use by 50 percent.

“It was a selling point that we didn’t consider at first,” Craig said. “But when we learned more about it, the more attractive it was. It made sense.”

The price, however, worried Nedra.

“It was the part that made me most hesitant,” she said.

Many gray areas remain when the NAHB talk about how building green impacts the environment. The NAHB writes in its guidelines for building green: “There is little publicly available information regarding manufacturing processes that document energy consumption, impact on natural resources, or CO2 emissions for each building material.”

The NAHB also addresses what they call “trade-offs,” or apparent contradictions that become evident in building green. For example, a recirculating hot water system, utilized in the Mitchell and all gold homes, “can help conserve water but may use a relatively large amount of energy in its operation,” the NAHB writes. The association admits that guidelines in their current form are based on experimental evidence and… independent scientific research.

“There are still many questions (that are) unanswered,” writes the NAHB.

Unanswered or not, Bryan Pratt, speaker pro-tem for the Missouri State House of Represenatives, said the state is examining legislation that will possibly, in the future, grant tax credits and incentives to both developers and green homebuyers.

“You’re going to see greater tax incentives to first time home buyers, and you’re going to see tax credits to folks like the Mitchell’s to buy and be able to afford green housing,” he said.